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Poppy, by Drusilla Modjeska

A few months ago my book club read Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller, in which she writes about her mother’s alcoholism and hospitalisation. Someone suggested Poppy (1990) as a comparison, because here too a daughter is writing about her mother’s breakdown and period in a sanatorium – the new name for what had previously been called an asylum. But Poppy is such a different sort of book that while the comparison is interesting, it isn’t what I find most useful or striking about Modjeska’s book.

Modjeska says in the acknowledgements, which are placed at the end of the book, that she intended to stick to the facts, but found herself ‘irresistibly drawn into dream, imagination and fiction.’ ‘The evidence I have used,’ she writes, ‘the diaries and letters, the conversation and stories, come from memory, the papers I have been given, and from the imagination I have inherited. Nothing should be taken simply as literal.’ I wish she had said this at the beginning, for it might have prepared me better for what was to come. I know that imagination plays a role in any recollection of the past –‘the fictional paradox of truthfulness’ – but here I am left with little idea of what really happened. To take a trivial but disorienting example, she has changed all the names, and I kept wondering why Drusilla was always referred to as Lalage. I guess that the major events of Poppy’s life are ‘real’, but that still leaves a lot of space for fiction. Does it matter? I don’t really know, but would nevertheless rather have known from the beginning. I didn’t notice until later the dedication of the book to ‘my mother who … never kept a diary’.

The story Modjeska tells is of her mother’s unhappy childhood and cold mother, her marriage to a kind but conventional man, their comfortable middle class life in the south of England, the birth of their three children and then the breakdown which lasted for two years. She later separated from her husband, took a university degree, worked as a probation officer and formed a new relationship. But though Modjeska starts writing about her mother, she finds she is also writing about herself. ‘Dimly I begin to ‘understand,’ she says, ‘why my struggle with her is also a struggle with myself, and my own attempt to speak.’ She married and left her mother and England, to live first in New Guinea, and then in Sydney. ‘Did I think I could investigate Poppy’s life without investigating my own?’ she asks.

While the events of Poppy’s life are interesting – for example she organised the first day centre for young offenders in England – these are not what Modjeska is primarily concerned with. She wants to know why things happened as they did. What caused the breakdown? Where did Poppy find the strength to recover from it? How was she affected by her divorce? Why did she and Drusilla have such a difficult relationship? Had that relationship affected all others that Drusilla attempted?

Modjeska approaches explanation using two related theoretical models: Freudian psychology (or what in my ignorance I take to be Freudian; there’s mention of Jung too) and feminism. Sometimes these make sense to me; at other times they jar. What, for example, to make of this? ‘I was engaged in a convoluted and private repetition of that primary struggle each of us first acts out with our mothers, pulled for the desire for a love that draws us back to the first moment before we are held to the mirror … and in that reflection, hers and ours, we see the future.’ We do? Really? I find the conclusion she puts into Poppy’s mouth about how she coped much more convincing. ‘I stopped impersonating myself … I was able to make peace with myself.’ In Modjeska’s terms, this comes from a feminist understanding of finding a woman’s voice, which is a preoccupation she shares. I did find enlightening her reference to the idea put forward by Ursula le Guin that there is a ‘father tongue’ which is the language of public discourse, of objective thought, which everyone needs to learn to take part in society. The ‘mother tongue’, on the other hand, is ‘conversational and inclusive’; there needs to be a balance between them. Modjeska also comments on the importance to women of friendship, though this is often obscured by the emphasis on husband and family. Reflections of this kind are scattered throughout. Most of them are wise, but I find a few of them pretentious.

This is clearly a book that will make a different appeal to different people; to use a dichotomy, those who prefer the ‘father tongue’ will have a different view from those who prefer the ‘mother tongue’. But then, as I’m sure Modjeska says somewhere, dichotomies are always false. We need le Guin’s ‘native tongue’ that ‘accommodates learning with blood and heart’.

I said at the beginning of this review that this book is nothing like Alexandra Fuller’s memoire of her mother, but on second thoughts, there is an important similarity; both show the strength of women in adversity.

You can read more about Drusilla Modjeska here. I loved some of her later books, such as The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2001). Her first fully fictional novel, The Mountain, set in New Guinea, was published in 2012.

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One Response

Thanks, Pauleen. I notice that you idftniey in both posts which I found fascinating that you read them for the challenge, but did you register (link) them on the challenge website/blog? I think you didn’t that is how we know you are contributing and the spreadsheet that is generated from reviewers’ links is what we use for our round-ups. To link your posts, look for the 2013 Challenge now open page under the blog banner, and click to get its dropdown list, then select Link your review . Follow the prompts. I think you’ll need to link both posts or just link the first and presume people will see the second?